


the forest, breathing fire

by Bluecoeur (vietbluefic)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: (but make it Baba Yaga's house too), (wherein the M9 each embody an element of the forest), Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Dark Fantasy, Essek Thelyss-centric, Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Retellings, Fire, Forests, Found Family, Gen, Gentle Ending, Immortal Found Family, Inspired by Slavic Mythology & Folklore, Mighty Nein as Family, One Shot, Personification, Short & Sweet, Soft but a little eerie, Vasilisa the Beautiful Elements, Widogast's Nascent Nine-Sided Tower
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:09:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28297290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vietbluefic/pseuds/Bluecoeur
Summary: The forest is not one; it is eight, and they all know Essek.(Or;A fairytale in which one family is exchanged for another.)
Relationships: The Mighty Nein & Essek Thelyss
Comments: 13
Kudos: 97





	the forest, breathing fire

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the Russian fairytale "[Vasilisa the Beautiful](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasilisa_the_Beautiful)." Because, evidently, my love language for characters I enjoy is to put them into fairytales and very occasionally give them happy endings. <3
> 
> Here, Essek plays a somewhat twisted-together role of both Vasilisa and the doll. I had fun writing this one, and I hope you enjoy it too! Merry Christmas!

The forest is not one; it is eight, and they all know Essek.

* * *

Blue Morning light approaches him — with fading stars scattered across her skin, and coils of night-sky for horns, and a mantle from which slivers of the sun and moon hang like jewelry. She runs up as gleeful as an old friend and exclaims, “Hi, oh man, hi! Where are you going?”

Essek needs a moment to find his voice. Without the magic of his mother ( _his maker_ ) nearby to fuel him, he feels loose, disconnected: like a doll with all its pieces a-jangle, held vaguely together with wire and will. He opens his mouth and says, “The nine-sided tower. Do you know where it is?”

“Oh, GOSH, aren’t you so lucky! Follow me, I’ll take you as far as I can go!”

Dew beads on the grass, then slides away and evaporates into mist as they walk. The Morning sings with the birds at dawn. Chatters away to him freely. The sun climbs higher in the sky, and about noontime, Essek turns to ask her a question — only to feel a fanged grin nuzzle his cheek.

“Time for me to leave now! She’ll help you the rest of the way.”

A ray of the Morning sun blinds him. By the time Essek regains his bearings, he finds beside him a wiry woman robed in cobalt-blues. The Day stares him down, fierce, skin deep and brown as earth under the sky.

“Well?” she quips, sharp and snippy. “You gonna just stand there catchin’ flies or what?”

Essek follows. Clouds trail after him and the Day, dispersed wispy high above. The cobalt-blue sky turns yellow, turns orange, turns pink and gold and indigo. This time, Essek is unsurprised when he glances over and sees a woman imposingly tall, dressed in moonless blacks with stars beading her braided hair. She leans over and touches his shoulder. Her eyes don’t match colors.

“Hello,” whispers the Night. He nods. The rest of the way is silent, but comfortable this time.

They don’t reach the tower; it comes to them. Nonagonal, red-stoned, it emerges from the trees padding on four cat’s-legs, and crouches when it deems them close enough. By the time it’s done so, Essek’s legs are trembling, his feet bloody, and so the Night carries him inside. Within, a man in robes dark as dead leaves, with hair as red as the tower-stones, stands up from before a roaring fireplace to greet them.

 _Fire._ Essek shudders to be this close to it.

In a low, accented voice, the man asks, “Who are you?”

“No one,” Essek whispers, because technically it’s true. The man cocks his head — a very feline gesture — and steps forward to take Essek’s hand. His eyes, which are very bright and very blue, glimmer like vats of flame themselves.

“You don’t have a heartbeat.”

“No.” Essek stares at their hands. Feels the heat emanating as if from inside the man’s skin. “We can’t make light in our home. My— The Umavi sent me here. To bring back fire.”

The man nods, solemn, as though he’d expected this. The Night murmurs, a near-inaudible _I should get going,_ and indeed the moon outside the tower’s high windows is moving right along.

“I am the Tower,” says the man with red hair to Essek. “Stay as long as you need.”

He is given a room, waited upon by spectral cats, granted free reign to wander the tower’s innumerable rooms. During the day, it is still and inert. At night, the tower roams on its cat’s-legs, swaying gentle as if a boat at sea; the Tower himself comes out to work, to read and play with his magic-servants. Essek borrows books, indulges the cats that step into his lap, and warms himself at the fires. Everywhere, there is _fire._ In the hearths, in the lamps, in the frosted bedroom windows. Essek dares to touch them, once, and within these tower walls they lick soft over his skin but don’t burn. He imagines it’d be a different story outside.

“I can give them to you,” says the Tower, “provided you do us favors in return.”

“What would you have me do?”

His tasks are this: first, to help the Trees keep the dead buried, rooted underground. The Trees are ( _is?_ ) warm, with a twisted crystal staff and soft pink lichen in his hair. Grass rots, dies, and grows again wherever he walks.

“That’s nice, thank you,” he drawls in a voice warm as autumn, and Essek finds that he doesn’t mind the black dirt under his nails that much at all.

(He accidentally uncovers a face: ram-horned, tattooed, and purple as dusk. The Soil cracks open a bloodred eye, peeks at him, and grins.

“’Sup,” he says. “Mind putting me back?”

Essek apologizes and buries him again hastily.)

Second, to help the Hollows find what’s been lost. She wears a yellow dress and strings of bone-bit jewelry — neither of which, surprisingly, affect her silent nimbleness at all. Essek rifles through piles of leaf-litter and rediscovers old squirrel-stashes, bones from forgotten kills, traces of those who’d wandered into the forest, long ago. He forages and finds mushrooms, nuts, bitter berries. He digs and uncovers buttons, rusted knives, a child’s shoe. He hands this last thing to the Hollows, where she turns it over and over in her brown hands, sadly.

“Thanks,” she says when they are done. He dips his chin, and hopes it was good, whatever this meant to her.

Third, to help the Water wash up the old. The Water is strong as a rapids-fall, green as lily pads, and when he first rises up out of a lake Essek expects him to wind an arm around his neck and pull him under to drown. Instead, the Water offers him an awkward _howdy,_ and then Essek sets to work. He wades until hip-deep in muck and mud, then roots around under the Water’s direction until he pulls up lost treasures, drowned enchantments and tossed-away weapons. These are washed in the lake-water, then dried and polished, until shining-new once more, and the Water lays a kind hand on the back of his neck that remains cool and damp, even as Essek walks back to the cat-legged tower.

“Was this enough?” he asks. There’s grave-dirt under his nails, burrs snagged in his shirt, mud seeped into the lines of his palms. He feels the forest in all his crevices: like moss, growing into a stone’s cracks, to pry him apart joint-by-violet-joint.

It is summer. It was summer when he got here. Essek wonders whether too much time has passed, or none at all.

“Yes,” replies the Tower. Silhouetted before the gaping scarlet fireplace, he is made of soot and shadow and sorcery itself. “Just a moment.”

And from the hearths, the walls, the stained-glass windowpanes, he pulls like a thread from a tapestry a small stream of violet-blue fire, which coalesces into his palm to pulse, like a little heartbeat. _Just like_ a little heartbeat, Essek realizes — moments before the Tower pushes the handful of flame across his chest, and it dissipates as something in him _thrums_. Heat surges down his bones. Scorches across his nails. His spine flares up unbearably hot. And suddenly Essek’s eyes are open, and he is gasping for air, and feeling more alive than he has ever been in centuries.

Essek staggers. Puts a hand over his chest. Grasps for words: “What have you done to me?”

Those eyes are bright and blue and very, very amused. “I’ve gifted you fire.”

The door behind him opens. Outside lies the forest and the rest of the dark, lightless world.

The man with red hair kisses him, and says, “Go home. Give and take light to whoever needs it, or doesn’t. Then come back to us.”

And now his eyes glimmer. Harder, colder: like sky and stones and swords, buried in a lake of fire.

He adds, “Maybe kill your mother, too, while you’re at it.”

* * *

The forest is not one; it is nine. And they say you can still find the tower, wandering on cat’s-legs at Twilight.

  
  



End file.
